


Another Kind of Sexual

by Buckysaur



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst, Asexual Character, Asexual Relationship, Asexual Steve, Asexuality, Developing Relationship, Established Relationship, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, M/M, Steve is still learning, There is kissing in beginning if that bothers anyone, but we all love him, patient Tony, who is also a bit of a moron
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-25
Updated: 2013-02-25
Packaged: 2017-12-03 15:27:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,844
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/699739
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Buckysaur/pseuds/Buckysaur
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>Of course Steve had known that this moment would come. He had hoped it wouldn’t, prayed it wouldn’t, wished and wished and wished again that </i>Please, God, please, don’t let it happen,<i> but of course it had. There was something broken about him that he didn’t understand. Something that was beyond the ‘bisexual’ and ‘homosexual’ and even the ‘demisexual’ that Tony had introduced him to, each of which Steve had once thought he was, had thought he could change into.</i></p><p>--</p><p>No one had bothered to explain, but when Steve gets stuck in his relationship with Tony, he is forced to bring it up</p>
            </blockquote>





	Another Kind of Sexual

Steve hummed contently into the kiss, but broke away with a jolt when he felt Tony’s hands linger at his belt buckle.

“Tony— Tony, wait.” He spoke hastily, gently but firmly gripping Tony’s wrists and pulling his hands away. Steve bit his lip, his eyes flicking from the wall to Tony’s eyes and then back to the wall again.

Tony frowned lightly. “What is it?” he asked, and had it not been for the subtle gleam of fear in Steve’s eyes, he might have just followed that with an innuendo. But the way Steve’s teeth dug into his lower lip was nervous, not arousing, and instead of the light pink blush that Tony had expected to see on his cheeks, Steve’s face looked ashen.

Concerned, Tony carefully twisted his wrist out of Steve’s grip and gently cupped the other’s jaw in his hand, lightly stroking his cheek with his calloused thumb. “Hey, Cap – _Steve_ , talk to me.”

Steve sighed and slumped back against the door that he had been pressed up against before Tony had taken a step back to let his hands wander. He averted his eyes again, avoiding Tony’s inquisitive look.

“We… we need to talk— I— _I_ need to talk to _you,_ ” he said in the end, his voice soft and somber.

Tony laughed, but inside of him he felt an uncomfortable nervousness bubble up. He’d heard those words far too often, and they were usually followed by a kind of ‘bad news’ ranging from bewildering to horrifying. “What, you're not going to tell me you're pregnant, now, are you?” he teased. “Because you know, we haven't even—” When he saw Steve’s tormented expression his smirk fell, rapidly replaced by a guilty frown. For a moment he wanted to hit himself for saying that, because how _could_ he be so insensitive, especially when Steve was so obviously hurting. “Okay, sorry, please— please forget I ever said that,” he stammered hastily, rapidly thinking of ways to make it right again. “Why don’t we sit down, hm?” he offered then, giving Steve’s cheek a nervous but gentle stroke before he slowly pulled his other wrist free too, after which he took Steve’s hand in his and led him to his bed where he sat down on the edge.

Steve let Tony pull him along and sat down too, still avoiding the other’s eyes and instead staring at his own hands, which he had folded in his lap.

His insides hurt, felt uncomfortably tight, as if he were about to be sick. He swallowed.

Of course Steve had known that this moment would come. He had hoped it wouldn’t, prayed it wouldn’t, wished and wished and wished again that _Please, God, please, don’t let it happen_ , but of course it had. There was something broken about him that he didn’t understand. Something that was beyond the ‘bisexual’ and ‘homosexual’ and even the ‘demisexual’ that Tony had introduced him to, each of which Steve had once thought he was, had thought he could change into.

As it turned out, none of the descriptions fit, and Steve was undefined and nonexistent once again. Outside of the rules, perhaps a rule breaker, even.

He was pulled out of his thoughts by Tony gently rubbing his leg and then squeezing his knee. He looked up into Tony’s eyes, and they were surprisingly gentle. Hardly a trace of his usual cocky exterior. Not a sign of his sarcasm, his wit and his sass. Steve let go of a relieved sigh. That, at least, was _something_ good.

“There you go,” Tony said, but the warmth in his voice almost hurt, as tender as it sounded. As if Steve could do nothing wrong, despite the fact that he really, _really_ had. “Just relax, I won’t run.”

Steve smiled wryly, _Not yet, no._ He thought to himself, but was once again pulled out of those thoughts by Tony, who stroked a few stray strands of blond hair out of his eyes.

“Don’t pull that face, Steve, I might not know what you’re thinking, but I know how you work,” Tony said, his voice a bit sterner, although it still had warmth at the core. “I know what that means, that smile, I use it all the time. I don’t want to see it on you.”

Steve sighed again, and looked up at Tony. “There is something wrong with me,” he blurted out, his eyes almost pleading for Tony to just send him away, to not ask for more, to just accept the fact that they would probably never work if Steve couldn’t get over himself, and to therefore leave Steve to himself, so at least _Tony_ could be happy.

Tony, however, was painfully quiet, looking at Steve with an unknown patience in his eyes as he tilted his head ever so slightly as if to say ‘go on’.

Steve bit his lip, frustrated. “I… I thought I could change. Fix it, but it didn’t work,” he said. “I just… I can’t do… _that_.”

Tony’s eyes narrowed slightly, and he leaned to the side on one arm. “What do you want to change?” he asked then, after a short silence in which he’d decided that that was the better question to ask out of the two. He could still come back to the ‘that’ that Steve had mentioned at a later time.

Steve looked at him, visibly frustrated with a frown on his face. “I don’t— I—” Tony remained quiet, waiting for the other to find the right words. Steve pursed his lips into a thin line and looked away. “Sex things,” he said then, nearly spitting the words out in a mixture of anger, disgust, shame and fear.

Tony blinked, processing that for a moment. “You mean that you _can’t_ …?” he asked carefully, unsure whether he was going in the right direction. It would explain the frustration and the shame, but not the rest, so he wasn’t convinced. It also wouldn’t make sense, what with the serum which was supposed to have ‘perfected’ Steve’s body, nullify any existing medical conditions.

Steve shook his head, his eyes widening a bit as he looked at Tony. “No, no, that’s not it… well, a bit, but…” he sighed again, frustration clear in his stiff muscles as his shoulders tensed and his hands balled into fists. “I can, I _do_ , sometimes, alone, but… I don’t… I don’t _want_ it. Not with someone else,” he said in the end, shooting Tony a helpless look.

Inside Tony’s head, a penny dropped, and his mouth opened wide, forming a large ‘O’ as he slowly nodded in sudden understanding. “You’re asexual,” he said then, the sentence both a statement and a question.

Steve’s eyes widened, and then narrowed as he frowned, but he leaned forward, closer to Tony, wanting an explanation because he’d heard so many ‘—sexual’s already, but not this one, and perhaps this one could be him. Another kind of sexual, that no one had bothered to explain. “What does that mean?” he asked.

Tony gave it a moment’s thought, trying to think of how best to describe it. “Well, for one you should know that sexual attraction and romantic attraction are different. Someone who is asexual isn’t sexually attracted to people. If you are asexual it could still be that you are romantically attracted to someone, so you might want to be with someone and hug and touch and perhaps even kiss or do a bit more than that, – although you do have to remember that it’s all a spectrum, so it really all depends on the person, – but you could not want to do sexual things. Like, things that are generally perceived as ‘sexual acts,’” Tony explained patiently. He looked at Steve, tilting his head to the side. “Does that make sense to you?”

Steve was quiet for a very long time as he thought that over. His mouth opened a few times, as if he was going to say something, but then he closed it and glanced up at the ceiling in silence. He swallowed. “Does that mean that… I’m not broken?” he muttered in the end, his voice soft as his eyes shifted to Tony to carefully observe the other’s reaction.

Tony’s expression was pained, and he opened his mouth, trying to speak, but no words would come out as he shook his head and furrowed his eyebrows into an expression of utter desperation. “No, Steve, God, no,” he uttered then, after which he reached out and pulled Steve tightly into his arms. He curled up around the other, nuzzling his nose into his messy blond hair as he pressed him to his chest. “No, no, you are _not_ broken,” he said, after which he pressed a kiss on top of Steve’s head.

Steve clung to Tony’s shirt as he screwed his eyes shut tightly. He felt good, safe in Tony’s arms, engulfed by the familiar smell of motor oil and coffee and the comforting warmth of what could only be described as _Tony_. Tony who had accepted him. Tony who had given him a home, a family, and now once again safety to be himself.

They sat like that for a long time, Tony holding Steve in his arms as he muttered sweet words of love and acceptance into his hair, and Steve holding on to Tony’s shirt until his knuckles turned white and his fingers were stiff and he finally let go and exhaled and _relaxed_. He sat up, careful not to bump his head against Tony’s chin as he moved. When he was at eye-level with Tony, he gingerly cupped his jaw in the palm of his hand, stroking Tony’s jaw with his thumb much like Tony had done before. He felt mellow, almost carelessly at ease with the situation all of a sudden.

His anxiety was gone, replaced by a stable understanding, a foundation of _knowing_ that Tony would accept him no matter what, and a firm trust beyond all doubt that Tony wouldn’t leave him for this. Wouldn’t condemn him for having been born like he had.

Tony smiled at him, relief and warmth and love and _caring_ coiling in the darkness of his eyes. He covered Steve’s hand with his own, squeezing it as he gently placed a kiss on his palm. “We’ll figure this out, okay? Make it work in a way we’re both comfortable with,” he said then.

Steve smiled and nodded, his eyes light with happiness and a release of long-held tension, finally let go of. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, please.” He hesitated, bit his lip for a brief moment, and then pressed a chaste kiss onto Tony’s lips. “Thank you, Tony. For…” _Understanding, helping, accepting,_ loving. “Being you,” Steve said with a crooked smile and a laugh.

Tony chuckled happily, and ruffled a hand through Steve’s hair. “Anytime, Capsicle,” he said, his eyes twinkling. “Now, I believe Clint said something about movie night?”

Hand in hand, they walked to the living room, and they didn’t let go of each other for a long time.

**Author's Note:**

> I want to give credit to asexual-not-a-sexual's Gender and Sexuality Masterpost, which you can find [here](http://asexual-not-a-sexual.tumblr.com/post/28253369005/ive-recieved-a-lot-of-requests-for-a). 
> 
> I also want to thank Lineke (Evangel on AO3, worldofprocrastination on Tumblr) for urging me to write this, and then patiently reading paragraph by paragraph as I wrote this and then going through a solid hour of beta-tweaking with me. She is also the one who last-minute suggested Tony making that pregnancy joke for IC's sake, which I then wrote in. I owe her big-time for that paragraph. <3
> 
> To add to that, I would also like to comment on Tony's character in this story, which Lineke and I had an interesting conversation about. Her and I both think that it is slightly strange to see Tony so patient, but that it is also In Character, and I would like to add my following theory to that, I quote: "I think it's IC because I imagine Tony would want his partner to be comfortable and informed." This is my reasoning behind Tony being as caring and patient as he is, and I hope you will agree with this.


End file.
